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Free-to-play MMO Runescape now has over 200 million registered players from over 150 countries, who between them have racked up more than 7 billion hours of game time.

"Although Runescape has achieved so much over the past decade, smashing 200 million accounts is a huge accomplishment for the dedicated development team and is thanks to our awesome community," said CEO Mark Gerhard.

"When the game was first released, nobody could ever have expected it would reach such high levels of popularity largely by community word of mouth. It has been an incredible journey to get to where we are today, and by continuing our tradition of constantly innovating, evolving and lovingly crafting Runescape we are certain to continue to break records by creating an online adventure like no other. We've witnessed a really strong resurgence in the game's popularity over the past two years and are seeing strong player growth year on year. "

In recognition of the achievement creators Jagex have launched a new in-game demon to battle, with a mere 200 million hit points, that will give players the chance to win a unique reward. There's also a new website showing the evolution of the game since its launch in 2010.

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2 Comments

Slight typo there. Runescape was launched in 2001. Yes, an 11 year old game that is FTP and which lives in the cloud!
Andrew Gower deserves a knighthood for creating and building Britain's most successful ever game publisher.

The problem for Jagex is breaking away from being a one product company, something they have tried several times. It looks like they are more likely to succeed at this by M&A than they are by organic means.
Imagine if they bought their management and technical skills to the treasure chest of IP that is Codemasters! We would instantly have a world class publisher that was British.

Jagex have certainly been very successful with Runescape, but 7 billion hours / 200 million accounts = 35 hours per account on average, over a period of several years. Given how many hours the people I know who play the game seem to spend on it, that suggests to me that most of those accounts are inactive. Do they publish DAU or MAU figures?